Assalamualaikum. My name is Widhi Muttaqien from Expose Academy. This is the third part video of our tutorial about UV unwrapping and texturing workflow in Blender. If you stumble upon this video directly you might want to check out the first and the second video before moving on. In this video we’re going to texture our mushroom model using the texture paint mode inside Blender.

Okay we already have this model and UV unwrap it in our previous video. Before doing any texture painting, as I mentioned before in the earlier video, you need to have UV mapping applied to your object. So texture painting must always come after UV mapping. Okay. If you try to do texture painting before the object’s UV map is fixed, it just wont work. You’ll get strange brush behavior and possibly a lag blender UI performance.

Okay select the object that we want to texture. And go to texture paint mode by clicking on this mode drop down list in here and choose texture painting. Now right away we can see this bright white color on our object. If we go to the tools panel up here. It says “missing data”. So Blender is trying to tell us now, that there is something wrong. There is something missing to be exact. This is due to our 3D object, currently doesn’t have any material and texture applied to it. We can fix this issue really easy by just clicking on the “add paint slot” pull down list in here. Notice there are so many option in here. Diffuse color, diffuse intensity, alpha and so on. This is because texture can be applied to different aspect of the shader or material. If we want to paint texture for the main color or the base color of the object, then we need to pick the top one which is the diffuse color. Okay. After selecting the type of texture we want to create we will be prompted with these option. Up here we can name our image. The name will be applicable through out Blender’s environment. Lets name it “mushroom_diff” as this texture is for the diffuse color. Then we can set the width size of the image. I’ll set this to 2048 so we have larger texture resolution. For texturing, it is recommended to always have square ratio, so the width and the height have the same length. Also using power-of-two values such as: 512, 1024, 2048 and so on. Why? Well, this will be a long story. But to make it short this numbers will create memory slots in the system in a very optimized way. Okay. To copy this value to this one. Simply hover your mouse over this text field and press Ctrl+C. Then hover over this one and press Ctrl+V. So no need to click on anything with the mouse.

Next is the color. This color will be used as the base color of the initial image. In here as we can see Blender use black as the default color. Now because our mushroom’s top area will be mostly red. We might want to use red color as the base color. So to change the color simply click on it. Use HSV color model. Now slide this value slider up about this position so we can see the colors in the color wheel. Bring this color pointer to red color. Then just move away from the color picker panel. Turn off alpha as we don’t want any transparency in our texture. And then just leave these settings to its default and click the OK button. As we can see, we now have this red mushroom.

Lets add white dots to the top area. Just click and draw the dots like this. If we want to change the brush size we can use this size slider in here, but this slider is not that intuitive as we can not see right away the relation of our brush size with our 3d model. The best way to change the brush size is to stay in the 3D view and press F in the keyboard. And just move the mouse left to right. We can see the preview of the brush size directly compared to our 3D model. Left click the mouse to confirm the new size. Another way to change the brush size is simply by zooming in and out in the 3D view. Notice if we zoomed-in using the mouse scroll, our brush will become relatively smaller compared to our model. If we zoomed-out our brush will be relatively bigger compared to the 3d model. Okay. I’ll speed up the video as it gets too repetitive.

Okay now we want to add some shading to our texture. Ideally when we want to add shading we use a layer on top of the base color layer and change the blending mode to multiply. We can do this easily in Photoshop or Krita. In Blender however the process is not that straight forward. Its doable [duwabel], but not as easy as other dedicated image editing software. There is an add on called BPainter created by Andreas Esau, which will greatly improve the texture painting process in Blender. If you want check it out, you can see the link in the video description. But in this tutorial we’re going to stick with the default Blender’s features. Also we want to cover just the fundamental. So we’re going to create everything in one texture without any layering. Okay.

The first thing we need to do is to pick darker color. The active color that we use for painting is indicated by this box at the left. This is similar to foreground color in Photoshop or Krita. And the right color is the background color. So click in here and turn down the value. And adjust the color pointer in here until you like the color that you see down here. Then just move away from the color picker panel or just click enter or escape.

Sometime we need to pick a certain color from our painted 3D model. We can do this easily using the S shortcut without clicking any mouse button. So for example if we want to sample this red color. Simply move our mouse over this area and then press S. So again we only use the mouse to hover over on a certain point. Then press S in the keyboard. Notice the color that we picked, will displayed in the foreground color section. At this point you might notice also that although our 3D model has some shading on it. We can see that this is darker and this is brighter. When we pick color from the model, Blender is smart enough to sample the true color of it. Not the color which already mixed with shading color. If we for example need to see those true color or the diffuse color to be exact. We can change the viewport shading mode from solid to texture. This way, Blender only display the texture without additional shading. The shortcut to access texture viewport shading is Alt+Z. So use this to go back and forth between the solid mode and the texture mode. Okay.

Next we want to change the opacity of the brush. Now the term brush-opacity is actually called strength in Blender. We can do this also with the slider at the left side in the tool shelf. 0 means that the brush is fully transparent thus has no effect at all. 0.5 means that it is 50% transparent. And 1 means that it is fully opaque. Using slider is okay, but then again it is better to use the shortcut for this. So to do this press Shift+F. This will display the brush-strength control. Pull this out and we have 0 opacity. Drag this to the center and we have fully opaque brush. Okay now what if we want to have 0.2 value without additional number. So basically rounding the value to only 1 digit after point. We can do this by holding the Ctrl key. In contrary if you want to have finer small value changes you can hold the shift key. Lets change the value to 0.2, so hold Ctrl and just drag this away a bit, until we have 0.2 value. Then left click to confirm.

Next we want to discuss is the blending mode of the brush. By default the brush blending mode is set to mix. If you used Photoshop or gimp or Krita before. The term mix is actually the same as normal mode, which basically will cover any image below the current brush stroke, without any additional processing. For simple coloring, mix blending mode will be enough. But for shading process, we want to change this to multiply. If you don’t know what multiply is. It is a type of Blending mode that will darken anything beneath the current brush stroke. Okay. After we have set up the brush like this, we can start darkening the edge of the mushroom. Don’t worry about accidentally brush the trunk area. We’ll fix those areas later, for now just focus on the top area of the mushroom. To add a little bit of highlight on top of the mushroom, we can pick brighter color in the color picker. Then change the blending mode to screen. Screen is the opposite of multiply. If multiply darkens the original image. Screen makes it brighter, so it is very useful for highlighting process. Just add some brush paint on the top of the mushroom. Make the brush size smaller or zoomed in. and just add couple of brushes again.

Okay I think the top area already looks great. But apparently our video becoming too long. So I need to stop it and we’ll continue in the next video. As always don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. Give a thumbs-up if you like the video and give a thumbs-down if you don’t like the video. See you in the next part. Wassalamualaikum.

An entrepreneur and an academic lecturer in computer graphic field. He has master degree in business management and system information. He founded several creative-based companies some of them are expose-3D (expose3d.com) and blastocode game studio (blastocode.com).

Assalamualaikum. My name is Widhi Muttaqien. I'm an entrepreneur and also an academic lecturer in Computer Graphic disciplines. Expose Academy is my company which provide courses in CG industry. We provide online courses internationally through Udemy and other platforms and also class-courses locally here in Indonesia.